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The Miniature Man
When young Marcy arrived at the St. Francis Sanitarium, a horrific experience had left her without any memories - without an identity. In an effort to learn more about the mysterious adolescent, her caretakers put her under hypnosis. But the treatment throws Marcy further inside herself, into the world of the Miniature Man.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2005
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17 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 7, 2013
Anyone who knows me know it’s rare that I ‘read’ a book. Sure, I flip through craft books and reference books, but to actually sit and read a physical book is a huge task for me. I hate reading. Mostly because it means I can’t do anything else. Music? Nope. Can’t concentrate. Drawing? Crochet? Nope, can’t watch what I’m doing. Travelling? Nope, inner ear problems = travel sickness.
So a measure of how good this book is, is that I picked it up for a quick ‘something to do’ while stuck in a hospital waiting for a physio appointment after I’d forgotten my journal and my phone had to be off, and finished it two days later.
From the very first page I was absorbed and drawn in by the characters. The descriptions of each character and their rich inner world is incredible, with each new thing you ‘discover’ about them, or they discover about themselves, revealing a little more of the truth behind them.
How do you write an amnesiac as if she’s interesting, when no one will tell her anything about herself? She can barely remember what happened to her yesterday, let alone the horrific ordeal she was put through, yet she is still rich and interesting and compelling. Her friendship with the contender for the weirdest character ever written, both stereotypically ‘weird’ and at the same time uniquely multi-faceted and unusual, is almost tangible before they even meet. Somehow you just know they’re going to end up friends.
Bizarrely, it comes as absolutely no surprise when an odd, dreamlike fantasy character turns up and starts mixing the pot, nor when the nuns of the sanitarium start to show their true colours. Everything in this larger than life, psycho-mystery-thriller-fantasy seems completely normal, except the excruciating normal Mrs Papp, whose ‘worrying mum’ persona jars horribly, and quite intentionally, against the rest of the book.
In fact, the most shocking part of it is the dream sequences towards the end, when you find out what really happened to Marcy. It’s gruesome, and if you’d known at the beginning you probably would have stopped reading. But if you trust the author to take you with Marcy on her journey of self discovery, by the time you get there you’re ready to face the truth as well as she is. I, for one, felt compelled to see it through with her, almost duty-bound to hold her hand through it.
The fantasy sequences don’t seem far-fetched, the odd behaviour of the boy in white doesn’t seem out of place amidst the peculiar lives of the sanatorium residents. The twist (there had to be one) that is both fantastically supernatural and starkly humane barely registers as odd against a backdrop of genius, memory loss, insanity and religious vows.
At it’s heart, this story is one of trust, broken and restored; of friendship, wanted and needed, dissolved and fought against.; of loneliness and belonging in a world of freaks. If you happen to understand chess and can follow ‘the game’, all the better, but you actually don’t need to understand it. By the time you reach the end, it will all fall into place and you will just see it, as clearly as if Julian had explained it to you.
I couldn’t put it down, and I do not exaggerate when I say that. For me to even pay the 50p to take it off the hospital’s charity table and bother to carry it home, it had to be pretty good within the first chapter. For me to sit and read the rest in two days, it had to be exceptional and by the time I was done I literally wanted to read it all over again straight away.
The story is complex, so much so that you might need to go back over things, yet at the same time incredibly short, easy to read, lightly written and (should you feel the need) the flashbacks to Marcy’s past are written in italic chunks, so those who wish to skip them can do so easily. In my opinion though, the unabridged version is a far better experience, and I felt an odd but distinct sense of triumph when Marcy and I finally recovered her memories.
Overall, it was excellently written, well paced, easy to become engaged with the characters and mystery, and a very enjoyable read. In fact, the only thing that really annoyed me about it was the author’s ridiculous name, which doesn’t show up properly on searches in Amazon! The author, r. muir. (sic) has written several other books in similar veins and I intend to see if I can find a few.
10/10 for a book I immediately wanted to start reading again the second I finished it.
So a measure of how good this book is, is that I picked it up for a quick ‘something to do’ while stuck in a hospital waiting for a physio appointment after I’d forgotten my journal and my phone had to be off, and finished it two days later.
From the very first page I was absorbed and drawn in by the characters. The descriptions of each character and their rich inner world is incredible, with each new thing you ‘discover’ about them, or they discover about themselves, revealing a little more of the truth behind them.
How do you write an amnesiac as if she’s interesting, when no one will tell her anything about herself? She can barely remember what happened to her yesterday, let alone the horrific ordeal she was put through, yet she is still rich and interesting and compelling. Her friendship with the contender for the weirdest character ever written, both stereotypically ‘weird’ and at the same time uniquely multi-faceted and unusual, is almost tangible before they even meet. Somehow you just know they’re going to end up friends.
Bizarrely, it comes as absolutely no surprise when an odd, dreamlike fantasy character turns up and starts mixing the pot, nor when the nuns of the sanitarium start to show their true colours. Everything in this larger than life, psycho-mystery-thriller-fantasy seems completely normal, except the excruciating normal Mrs Papp, whose ‘worrying mum’ persona jars horribly, and quite intentionally, against the rest of the book.
In fact, the most shocking part of it is the dream sequences towards the end, when you find out what really happened to Marcy. It’s gruesome, and if you’d known at the beginning you probably would have stopped reading. But if you trust the author to take you with Marcy on her journey of self discovery, by the time you get there you’re ready to face the truth as well as she is. I, for one, felt compelled to see it through with her, almost duty-bound to hold her hand through it.
The fantasy sequences don’t seem far-fetched, the odd behaviour of the boy in white doesn’t seem out of place amidst the peculiar lives of the sanatorium residents. The twist (there had to be one) that is both fantastically supernatural and starkly humane barely registers as odd against a backdrop of genius, memory loss, insanity and religious vows.
At it’s heart, this story is one of trust, broken and restored; of friendship, wanted and needed, dissolved and fought against.; of loneliness and belonging in a world of freaks. If you happen to understand chess and can follow ‘the game’, all the better, but you actually don’t need to understand it. By the time you reach the end, it will all fall into place and you will just see it, as clearly as if Julian had explained it to you.
I couldn’t put it down, and I do not exaggerate when I say that. For me to even pay the 50p to take it off the hospital’s charity table and bother to carry it home, it had to be pretty good within the first chapter. For me to sit and read the rest in two days, it had to be exceptional and by the time I was done I literally wanted to read it all over again straight away.
The story is complex, so much so that you might need to go back over things, yet at the same time incredibly short, easy to read, lightly written and (should you feel the need) the flashbacks to Marcy’s past are written in italic chunks, so those who wish to skip them can do so easily. In my opinion though, the unabridged version is a far better experience, and I felt an odd but distinct sense of triumph when Marcy and I finally recovered her memories.
Overall, it was excellently written, well paced, easy to become engaged with the characters and mystery, and a very enjoyable read. In fact, the only thing that really annoyed me about it was the author’s ridiculous name, which doesn’t show up properly on searches in Amazon! The author, r. muir. (sic) has written several other books in similar veins and I intend to see if I can find a few.
10/10 for a book I immediately wanted to start reading again the second I finished it.
November 13, 2020
I liked, in fact really enjoyed the character development. I understood them and predicted behaviours because of how well they were put out. But there was something incomplete in the way it ended. I somehow wanted more, maybe 10 more pages would have been nice. The female character’s backstory was very painful to read, no doubt well written. In a way I think, the characters were so real, they actually imitated human beings and their fickle nature and that’s what left me feeling incomplete.
June 9, 2024
In this psychological novel, an albino chess prodigy and a girl suffering from amnesia after a rape meet as patients of a remote Arizona saanatorium run by nuns. The author weaves the minds and motives of these unforgettable characters into a mesmerizing book that's impossible to put down.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews